My “Song of the Day” blog began this week with an enchanted train; in actuality, a wheezy rickety commuter train on the Long Island Rail Road. Today, I’ll turn to the “prince of wheels–the luxury liner of locomotive trains”: the Twentieth Century, Ltd., which zoomed like a comet through the Broadway firmament of my halcyon days.
Read MoreGiven that, this week, I’m writing about songs for NYFOS, I’d be remiss if I didn’t select at least one song in a foreign language.
As a show tune fan, I would have had a few options to choose from—“Dites-Moi” from South Pacific, say, or “Abbondanza” from The Most Happy Fella—but why be doctrinaire? Besides, one of my all-time favorite songs of any provenance came to me via an EMI collection of French popular chansons, Paris by Night, one of those many evocative international anthologies that were released in the first decade of the compact disc.
Read MoreMany great songs are American standards; some fly under the radar of popular culture. And then there are a few great songs that haven’t even been properly introduced to the radar. In 1965, you would be hard-pressed to find two songwriters who better represented the relay race of Broadway show tunes than Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim.
Read MoreI grew up on Long Island, forty-five minutes from Broadway (actually forty-nine) and my father commuted to the city and back on the Long Island Rail Road, five days a week, for 38 years. One night, he trudged wearily through the front door, tossed his briefcase aside, collapsed in a chair and said, “I’ve just added it up: I’ve spent three-and-a-half years of my life on the Long Island Rail Road.” “The Enchanted Train” offers a far more uplifting portrait of that venerable conveyance, the local commuter train.
Read MoreSufjan Stevens’ seventh album “Carrie and Lowell” reveals the possibility of turning darkness into something honest and powerful. These eleven laments seek to find answers during a very private struggle for Sufjan— reflecting on life, death, and finding God after the death of his mother who abandoned him. Sufjan quietly retreated to find these answers in simple orchestrations and haunting poetry that dive into a place of unapologetic grief.
Read MoreI really adore this little John Cage song, “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs.” It’s a setting of Joyce’s Ulysses and goes against every kind of traditional text setting I can think of -— it sort of deals with Joyce words but not really, it’s just cycles through the same pitches over and over again. And yet it works —
Read MoreJacob Cooper is a fellow member of Sleeping Giant, my composers’ collective. I was really hoping to get his music on the show, but alas nothing quite fit. So I’m featuring this really beautiful song of his. Unlike Bon Iver, the voice is not transformed. Instead a lost sample of La bohème is transformed into a pulsing and repeated chord.
Read MoreI love Kanye. I also love “I love Kanye”. Lots of folks can’t stand him but something I fundamentally love about him is his blatant appropriation/re-adaptation of older materials. In “Blood on the Leaves” he pulls one of the most audacious moves I can think of — sampling the very famous recording of Nina Simone singing Billie Holiday’s “Strange fruit” and combines it with TNGHT’s “R U Ready”.
Read MoreIf there’s two things I love in music, it’s weird sounds, and beautiful harmonies; and the power of what happens when they’re mixed together. “715 – CR∑∑KS” is a perfect example of both. Throwing his voice into a vocoder, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver transforms his voice into a virtual choir, but not without the artifacted nature of these vocal transformations revealing the fundamental fragility of the intentions of its protagonist.
Read MoreMost of you have certainly heard of Duke Ellington, but how many of you are familiar with the work of the lyricist Marshall Barer (1923-1998)? He had his greatest Broadway success as the lyricist for the musical Once Upon a Mattress, written with composer Mary Rodgers, whose songs are part of this week’s NYFOS “Rodgers, Rodgers, & Guettel” concerts. Barer is often referred to as the greatest lyricist you have never heard of.
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